How Britain’s Right Can Recover
Better answers on economy, immigration would help
[The Editors is called The Editors, plural, not The Editor, singular, for a reason. When I launched it, a shrewd friend advised, “it can’t just be you.” I’m delighted to start introducing some additional voices. Today’s comes from Michael Mosbacher, who is associate comment editor at London's Daily Telegraph. He is a past editor of Standpoint and The Critic, having co-founded both British magazines.—Ira Stoll.]
Britain’s Conservatives are choosing a new leader. The party has had to get used to this; whoever takes over at the start of November will be the sixth in eight years, the fourth in two. But, after their defeat in the July 2024 general election — down to 121 members of Parliament from 365 five years previously, the worst drubbing in the party's history — it is the first leadership election since 2005 while the party is in opposition.
Regardless of which of the candidates wins (the party’s MPs have started off the process of whittling down the original six to two, who will be put to the membership in October; the final members’ vote is currently looking most likely to pit the former centrist, immigration hardliner Robert Jenrick against the anti-woke, Nigerian-heritage Kemi Badenock), the Conservatives need to have clear answers to three questions. If they don’t, their chances of recovery are slim.
The Tories must regain their reputation for economic competence. Over the last 14 years in office, the party has repeatedly spoken the rhetoric of low taxes and promised a bonfire of red tape – while simultaneously raising the tax burden to its highest level in over 70 years and introducing yet more regulation. It has been the worst of all worlds — discrediting pro-market policies while failing to actually implement them.
The party has waxed lyrical about the entrepreneurial spirit, but it has done little to nurture it. Today the UK’s highest earning 1 percent are paying 29 percent of all income tax. The Conservatives had genuine problems to deal with — Covid-19 and soaring energy costs — but the hugely costly furlough scheme and energy bills subsidy were of their own making and caused public spending to surge.
The level of government debt is now so great that when Liz Truss, the only Tory prime minister of the last 14 years who was a real believer in markets (although she was responsible for the prodigious and ill-thought-out energy market intervention) did try to cut taxes on wealth creators, the bond markets rebelled amid fears of a pension fund collapse. The policy was swiftly reversed, followed not long after by Truss’s exit from Downing Street after just 50 days in office.
So the next Tory leader will need to regain a reputation for economic competence for the party. This might become easier if Labour makes a stupendous mess of things — which with their tax plans is looking increasingly likely.
The next leader must show a plan to tackle mass immigration that could actually work.
All six Tory prime ministers since 2010 have promised to reduce net levels of migration to the UK. Indeed, one of the Conservatives’ main attack lines against Labour when Tony Blair and Gordon Brown were in office was that immigration was out of control.
Yet migrant numbers have gone up and up. In 2010 net migration stood at 256,000 — and the Tories pledged to reduce it to the tens of thousands.
By the time of the Brexit vote to leave the European Union in 2016, net migration still stood at around 250,000 — and the Tories were still pledging to reduce it to the tens of thousands. Post Brexit, in 2022, net migration stood at over 700,000. There was a slight drop in 2023 (mainly to do with toughening up rules for student visas) to 685,000 — but nothing to convince voters that the issue was meaningfully being tackled. In a country Britain’s size, with numbers at these levels, unease about the welfare costs and cultural effects of immigration outweighs any optimism about the economic dynamism and other benefits of talented human capital.
Without convincing voters that they can actually reduce numbers, and not just mouth platitudes, the Tories will continue to hemorrhage votes to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK.
The Tories need to find a way of attracting younger voters. This is paramount if the Conservatives are to recover — otherwise the party is doomed in the long term. The abandonment of the Tory cause by those in their twenties, thirties and forties has been inexorable.
In the United Kingdom, age rather than class has become the best indicator of someone’s voting intentions. Prior to this year’s election, the Conservatives’ worst defeat was in 1997 when Blair won a landslide majority. That year, 27 percent of 18 to 24 year olds voted Tory, and 28 percent of 25 to 34 year olds did so. The 2019 election produced a Conservative majority of 80 seats, the biggest for the party in over 30 years — yet their share of the youth vote, at 21 percent of 18 to 24 year olds and 23 percent for 25 to 29 year olds, was much worse than in their 1997 wipeout.
And things have become considerably worse since. In 2019 the crossover point at which people started to be more likely to have voted Conservative than Labour was 39; this year it had risen to 63.
The Conservative party membership is also literally dying off. In 2001, over 250,000 members voted in the leadership election; by 2005, it was just under 200,000; in 2022, it was down to 140,000.
There is no reason why younger voters should not back a right-of-center party. Too often in the British debate it is assumed that there is something inevitable about the Tories having to rely on the pensioner vote, but there just isn’t. In France and Germany, indeed across much of Europe, parties of the right do well with younger voters.
Perhaps the major reason younger voters are put off voting Conservative is the unaffordability of housing. This is a direct result of the extremely restrictive planning rules in the UK. The Tories have been reluctant about freeing these up, even though they know it must be done. The reason is that new development is unpopular among existing, older Tory voters in the party’s traditional heartlands.
But without tackling the issue, it is not only these constituencies that are at risk. Without reconnecting with younger voters, the Tories are surely doomed.
If a new Tory leader can succeed in restoring confidence in the party on the economy and immigration, and in reconnecting with younger voters, it could not only restore the party to power in the United Kingdom, but also provide a template, or at least some ideas, that might inspire imitation elsewhere in Europe, or even in the Americas.
Labour didn't "win" the election; their vote percent barely changes. The Conservatives lost the election by hemorrhaging votes to the Reform party and the Liberal Democrats.
If Reform voters skewed young and Conservative voters skewed old, the combination of both may have had a conventional age distribution.
It is interesting that "UK’s highest earning 1 percent are paying 29 percent of all income tax".
In the USA, the highest earning 1% paid 45.8% of federal income tax in 2021. However, when one adds social security tax and state taxes, which have flatter rates by earning level than rates for income tax, the percentage paid would be less. It would take a sophisticated analysis to calculate how much less to make the comparison to UK data.